Privacy

I’ve already got a ton of ‘em but I’m always on the lookout for more. What are your favorite lesser-known DNS blocklists?

So we know the UK, France, Sweden and Australia all have “pondered out loud” about getting platforms like Signal to allow backdoors into encrypted calls and messages.

This creates a sense of safety about these platforms being secure, because governments want to come after them.

Here’s a tinfoil hat take: Five Eyes is significantly reducing inter cooperation. The non-fascist parts of the alliance don’t want to share with the obvious authoritarian, but the authoritarian one used to share the fruits of their established backdoors with them, and now they don’t.

Note that the US isn’t asking signal for a backdoor. Why? Back in 2015-2016 (last years of Obama), Apple had a loud and visible feud with the FBI. Since the authoritarian came to power, this all disappeared from the media. Interestingly, 10 years have gone by since that moment, every single aspect of our lives has become more surveilled, and somehow the US govt has stopped trying to get into phones? *While the CEO is making hand deliveries of 24 karat gold bars to the Oval Office?

TLDR; I think a safe assumption that they are in our devices by now. Fundamentally people misunderstand encryption. Encryption is only as strong as the weakest link. If your signal chats are unencrypted for consumption on your device, then that’s when the unencrypted content can be captured.

For the longest time, Apple stored your iCloud backups encrypted. Looked good in marketing materials, until they casually admitted the decryption key is stored in the same cloud.

Combine this with ICE capturing citizens without due process. If you have a vanilla smart device, you’re doing the surveillance for them. /tinfoilhat

~this is OG content created by me, a Lemmy user. Please don’t go too .ml on me in the comments.~

Author @kingofras@lemmy.world

Mozilla has added support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) translation on both desktop and Android following user requests. This update allows millions of users to translate web content without sending their data to the cloud. This is done via an on-device translation model and helps Mozilla achieve its mission of user privacy.

The translation models download automatically once and then work entirely offline on the user’s device. Mozilla says that Firefox doesn’t track the content users translate with this tool.

Like the dummy that I am, I've been using NoScript on my phone and 2 PCs... independently picking out which scripts will prevent a website's most critical functionality from breaking by guessing.

I'm now finally coming to a point of wanting to merge them, since I sometimes go to different sites on my phone versus the PCs, etc.

Is there any tool or way to merge them in a pro-whitelist way? Like, if any of them has a script on a whitelist, then the synced result will put it on a whitelist. That'd be great!

The UK's Online Safety Act doesn't just age-gate porn; it blocks material deemed "harmful" to minors. Days after the law went into effect, reports of non-explicit content on social media getting blocked in the region started to crop up. Subreddits from r/IsraelCrimes to r/stopsmoking are now walled in the UK. Video games, Spotify, and dating apps have instituted or will institute age checks.

Given the SCOTUS age verification decision [June '25], Stabile fears that people [in the US] will go "mask off" in the fall and spring, when state legislatures start getting back together. "People are going to attempt to restrict the internet even more aggressively," Stabile said. "I think people are going to work to restrict all sorts of content, particularly LGBTQ content, but also content that is broadly defined as any sort of threat or propaganda to minors." Other experts Mashable spoke to agree with him.

"I'm going to jump to the end step," [Eric Goldman, law professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law] said. "The end step is that most online users are going to be required to age authenticate most of the time they visit websites. That's going to become the norm." In a paper he wrote, Goldman called these statutes "segregate-and-suppress" laws.

The stated reason behind these laws is to "protect children." But as journalist Taylor Lorenz pointed out, in the UK, age verification is already preventing children from accessing vital information, such as about menstruation and sexual assault.

"When we see crackdowns on spaces on the internet, we're essentially stripping away that potential for self-actualization," Goldman said. We've reached the dystopian stage of the internet, he added.

VP.NET is built on a foundation of zero-knowledge privacy. By publishing our SGX enclave source code, we enable users to:

• Verify our no-logging policy through code inspection
• Confirm that servers cannot access user data or traffic patterns
• Validate that the code running on our servers matches this public repository

I usually don’t try using coupons since many of the codes shown on websites don’t work, but I feel bad for not trying hard or smart enough. I’ve heard good things about Retailmenot, I haven’t tried it yet but I wondering if there are privacy trade-offs.

Accrescent, for those who don't know, is an alternative android app store. They aim to compete directly with the play store, so unlike F-Droid they include both FOSS and proprietary apps. They are also very security focused. They're still small but I find their approach interesting and their ambition worth supporting.

Unfortunately, as with many FOSS projects, funding is a challenge. If you believe they are worth supporting, please read the linked blog post.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the project in any way, just a fan trying to raise awareness.

Ecosia, the tree-planting search engine from Berlin, and Qwant, France's privacy-focused search provider, announced a joint venture in November 2024 to develop their own European search index[^5][^6]. The partnership aims to reduce their dependence on Microsoft's Bing APIs, which both companies currently rely on for search results[^6].

The new venture, called European Search Perspective (EUP), is structured as a 50-50 ownership split between Ecosia and Qwant[^6]. Qwant's engineering team and existing search index development will transfer to EUP, with Qwant CEO Olivier Abecassis leading the joint venture[^6].

"The door is open and we are ready to talk to anyone," said Abecassis, while noting they want to "move as fast as possible" with their existing shareholders' support[^6]. The index will begin serving France-based search traffic for both engines by Q1 2025, expanding to cover "a significant portion" of German traffic by end of 2025[^6].

Rising API costs are a key motivator, following Microsoft's massive price hike for Bing's search APIs in 2023[^6]. However, neither company plans to completely stop using Bing or Google, instead aiming to diversify their technical foundation as generative AI takes a more central role in search[^6].

[^6]: TechCrunch - Ecosia and Qwant, two European search engines, join forces on an index to shrink reliance on Big Tech

Direct link to PDF: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/26041555/nyc-surveillance-peoples-handbook.pdf

Please don't offer self-hosted options as i can't selfhost atm.